"He told me she knew."
"But the communion wine!"
"Communion alcohol! Alcohol is alcohol, I don't care whether it's in a saloon or a church or pickling snakes in a museum. I tell you, Tommy's case has made a prohibition crank of me. Talk about it's being a man's lack of will and moral strength—bah! I never knew a man who had more will power than he, or who was more on the square. You know it."
"I—to be sure—except, you know, when he gives way to these attacks."
"Gives way!—and you've seen him fight! It's a disease, I tell you—a monomania like any other monomania. Why don't they say to a crazy man in his lucid intervals, 'Trouble with you is your lack of will power and moral strength. Brace up. Go to church'?"
"But you'd surely not say that Tom's insane? He himself lays it to his own weakness."
"What else is insanity but a kind of weakness—a broken cog in the machine which slips and throws everything out of gear, no matter how big the dynamo? I tell you, a dipsomaniac is no more to be blamed for lack of will power or moral strength than is a kleptomaniac, or than an epileptic is to be blamed for having fits. It's a disease. I'm giving it to you straight what the doctors say."
All the hopefulness went out of the Englishman's boyish face.
"Gad!" he murmured. "Gad! Then he can't overcome it."
"I don't know. The doctors don't seem to know. They say that a few seem to outgrow it—they don't know how, though. But all agree that the thing to do is to keep the patient braced—keep him boosted up."